Kelley: Conservatives will find the right path back

‘In the tumultuous history of postwar American conservatism," writes Sam Tanenhaus in the New Republic, "defeats have often contained the seeds of future victory."

In 1954, redbaiter Joseph P. McCarthy's blatant disregard for the truth and his censure by his own Senate colleagues supposedly consigned conservatism to the political ash heap.

Yet, a year later, William F. Buckley Jr. cleared away the stink and paved the way for conservatives to hash out hypotheses in his prestigious National Review.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson trounced (486 electoral votes to 52) Barry Goldwater, the college dropout whose book "The Conscience of a Conservative" sold more than 3.5 million copies.

To add insult to injury, the GOP also suffered a staggering setback when scores of seats in both houses of Congress went Democrat. In fact, James Reston, New York Times' Washington bureau chief, concluded: "Barry Goldwater not only lost the presidential election but the conservative cause as well."

Yet, Goldwater's supporters, who, post-election, found themselves large and in charge of the GOP, set out to inspire "forgotten" and "silent" Americans "who quietly go about the business of paying and praying, working and saving."

Although Goldwater would never be president, his botched campaign still managed to raise social and moral issues that would prove fundamental to coming conservative coups.

While Ronald Reagan, esteemed for his "A Time for Choosing" convention introduction of Goldwater, succumbed to incumbent President Gerald Ford during the 1976 presidential primary, his supporters would live to fight another day.

After four years of doom and gloom, the nation was more than ready for Reagan's upbeat message of peace, prosperity and patriotism. The next dozen years began with Reagan's Inaugural observation, "Government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem" and the release of 53 American hostages.

"After George W. Bush's two terms," Tanenhaus adds, "conservatives must reckon with the consequences of a presidency that failed, in large part, because of its fervent commitment to movement ideology: the aggressively unilateralist foreign policy; the blind faith in a deregulated, Wall Street-centric market; the harshly punitive ‘culture war' waged against liberal ‘elites.'"

But is conservatism actually "dead," as Tanenhaus claims, or are reports of its demise, as Mark Twain once quipped, greatly exaggerated?

It is telling that the most widely accepted brand of American conservatism today is not classical conservatism, ideological conservatism, neoconservatism, or even paleoconservatism.

It's Reaganism — not only because Reagan is the standard by which all other contenders are measured, but because many of his conservative ideas have also served as the source, without attribution, of planks in the Democratic platform as well.

Conservatives cheered when Bill Clinton pronounced: "The era of big government is over." Indeed, the contention that Reagan's election in 1980 inaugurated three decades of rule by the right doesn't get much opposition in political science circles today.

"Reaganism has survived," argues John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge of the Wall Street Journal, "because it went with the grain of American culture, tapping into many of the deepest sentiments in American life: religiosity, capitalism, patriotism, individualism, optimism."

Reaganism has survived because our 40th president, like the 18th century politico Edmund Burke, based his philosophy not on a particular set of ideological principles but rather on a distrust of all ideologies.

As Burke, who would have vigorously approved of "The Great Communicator," once wrote: "A disposition to preserve and an ability to improve, taken together, would be my standard of a statesman. Everything else is vulgar in the conception, perilous in the execution."

Tanenhaus bemoans the triumph of "movement conservatism" over the Burkean variety. In "Death of Conservatism," he argues that "the paradox of the modern Right" is that "its drive for power has steered it onto a path that has become profoundly and defiantly un-conservative," and that has finally led to electoral disaster, political irrelevance and "rigor mortis."

Yet, if the origins of modern conservatism can be traced to the philosophical clashes among the myriad dollar-a-year men who came to power during the New Deal, then the seeds of future victory for conservatives just might be found in Barack Obama's formidable crush of conservative John McCain (365 electoral votes to 173) during the last election.

McCain will pave the way — but not for conservatives who put their faith in the less-than-charitable hope that Obama's policies will flop.

McCain will pave the way — but not for conservatives who allow Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin to speak for them.

McCain will pave the way — but not for conservatives defined by what they oppose ("socialized medicine," "big government" or "activist Supreme Court justices") — but rather by what they support.

Those who yearn to "conserve" individual liberty, traditional values, personal responsibility, limited government and strong national defense will return to power.